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Charlie Vermont is a poet and healer in the tradition of William Carlos Williams.

Forty-some years ago he began sending me terrific poems, which I in turn put in that journal now famous for its wall-to-wall rich kid balloon and taxidermy parties. Back then however the publication did have one claim to relevance, at least for the Intelligence Agency which (as we poet dupes would latterly learn) was covertly "running and financing the operation". It made a really cool front. All that's now been found out. A cure for the disrespect this journal has thereby earned and richly deserved is to search the ancient files and dig up the actual poems.

Charlie's poems may be found by the perspicacious in issues #47, 49, 51 and 55 of The Paris Review.

It's been a long time since Charlie and I have seen one another (Bolinas in the Jurassic Period) but then it's been a long time since I've seen anybody, and I feel Charlie's personal presence all the time in his writing voice. In those interim years which I've assiduously wasted Charlie was putting his folk shoulder to the communitarianism and conscientious social activism wheel across the wilds and stretches of the High Southwest and ended up going all the way for his principles, becoming a people's doctor in a part of these States where that kind of miracle can still occur. All hail and salute then!

Michelangelo's images of compassion appeared to hold up here and the human feeling content also being upheld would constitute a remarkable thing in itself; not many poems can stand without embarrassment in the light of the Sistine Chapel after all.

Susan, about places -- Charlie probably has that legendary New York State of Mind deeply engrained, but now he's in, no not Vermont, but Arkansas. He has been a close observer of American life from those as well as other interesting vantages; the privileges of the several avocations and professions.

The physical impossibility of keeping your eyes open when attending to the suffering of another - and yet that's what you're called to. Set this alongside the "possibility" of "the unlikely outcome" - to be passed over as "...she went back to who she was...".

This is somebody writing out of a place full of tough ethical demands and writing great poetry at that!

It often feels like wasted timeaway from the poet's words his dispatchesgenerous greens, mauves, orangesgreystherethe downcast eyes he goeson and on about...even ellipses are fascinatingand thoroughly examined.

What is found there is what time is all aboutmore or lesstrue. Like bearsare true.